ANCHORAGE — At Scenic Park Elementary in East Anchorage, lunch begins with thundering footsteps and the distribution of plastic-wrapped ham sandwiches, pineapple slices and a three-bean concoction called “Cowboy Confetti.”

Kids with faces flushed from recess line up to buy Anchorage School District lunches that are, starting this year, federally mandated to be healthier.

New U.S. Department of Agriculture guidelines that require schools to restrict calories, serve fruits and vegetables every day and reduce saturated fat and sodium went into effect at the beginning of this school year.

If schools don’t comply, they risk losing federal money for free and reduced-price lunch programs. More than 40 percent of Anchorage district students are eligible for such programs.

All that means fewer pizza days and more broccoli and bananas in the roughly 18,000 lunches served each day, said district dietitian LaDonna Dean

The district must strike a balance between serving healthier food and food that schoolchildren will actually eat, Dean said.

The biggest changes this school year include a shift to two types of entrees: “homemade-style” dishes like spaghetti or chili, and traditional school lunch fare like chicken burgers.

The idea, which Dean says came from community feedback, is that students should have a chance to eat something they might see being prepared in their own home.

“(Parents) don’t want their kids to go to school and just get corn dogs and chicken nuggets,” she said.

Those are still on the menu, but are served less frequently. Pizza only shows up once every few weeks.

Vegetables, divided into categories like “dark greens” and “reds and oranges,” must be served every day of the week.

Familiar foods like corn dogs have also been tweaked: they are now made from chicken sausage with whole grain breading.

Part of a successful lunch is making sure kids are hungry and ready to eat, says fourth grade teacher Kelly Eagleton. The school recently shifted recess time to before lunch, so kids can work up an appetite.

At long tables, the culinary critics of the fourth and fifth grade dissected their lunches with surgical precision.

Recess activities such as rolling down hills make everybody hungrier for lunch, according to fourth grader Makenzie Bates, who sat eating a sandwich packed from home Wednesday.

She eats school lunch sometimes but hadn’t really noticed the new, healthier options. She was unaware that the beloved corn dogs were made from chicken. Kids, she said, like fruits like apples, grapes and pineapple.

But they were far from the favored lunch food of many of her classmates.

“That, I think, is pizza,” she said.

The fifth graders were harsh critics of lunch regimes new and old.

“School lunch tastes like, bluggh,” said Grant Aicher, making a grossed-out face as he peeled an orange from home.

Did students know that the school district was trying to make lunch healthier?

“That’s even worse,” said wide-eyed Cooper Lisonbee.

Yes, some food gets thrown away, said Mary Spears, who single-handedly manages the lunchroom and hands out food to the roughly 160 kids who buy lunch daily.